


Academic

by Oureias



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: College, M/M, Multi, Some Fluff, adam goes to harvard, and maybe some murder, background sarchengsey, both ronan and adam are the hot one, don't mess with the parrish-lynch family, everyone thinks adam's a witch, noah is remembered!!!, pynch - Freeform, the president of the CSU thinks Adam's the Antichrist, with a bit of kidnapping
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-05
Updated: 2016-08-17
Packaged: 2018-07-29 12:06:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7683946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oureias/pseuds/Oureias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam’s classmates aren’t really sure what to make of this fragile strong witchboy and his boyfriend. Adam at Harvard, Freshman Year. HIATUS</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Miscommunication is Bad for the Soul

Adam drives himself to college, but concedes to take Ronan and Ronan’s car. Ostensibly so that the former can drive the latter back —“What are you gonna do with a car at Harvard?” Ronan had said, “park on top of a fucking building?”— but really because he doesn’t want to make the ride alone.

He’s starting to wish that he had though, because between Ronan, Chainsaw, himself, and the trunk stuffed full of dorm paraphernalia, the car is feeling two sizes too small.

“Ronan,” Adam grinds his teeth. “I love you, but I’m going to murder you if you keep playing this.”

Ronan’s response is to crank the volume, lean over the shift, and start singing louder in Adam’s face.

“Okay, that’s it. I’m done.” Adam shifts into the right lane and  looks for the nearest exit, whipping them around the curve into a rest area and a dead empty Chili’s parking lot. Oh, the joys of driving at 7:30 in the morning. The car thunders with the screechy bass and Adam is entirely glad that his deaf ear is pointed at the speaker.

“Move,” Adam says and Ronan hops easily from the car, Chainsaw making interested noises from the backseat. Adam steps away from the now-off car as well, stretching his arms above his head. His sweater lifts off his hips as he does so, a product of another unforeseen growth spurt. He rolls his shoulders and turns to see Ronan staring at him. He doesn’t avert his gaze, making it a challenge. Adam stares right back, then scratches his fingers lightly over Ronan’s buzzcut as he moves to the passenger seat.

“You drive the rest,” he says. “I’m picking the music.”

“No banjo shit,” Ronan growls, but there’s no real heat behind it.

Adam does not, in fact, play “the banjo shit,” but something with a real melody and lyrics that don’t consist of “squash one, squash two, squash three, aaaaaaaaaaaaggggghhhhh”.

“Your music is depressing.”

“It’s reflective,” Adam says, but then takes pity on Ronan and changes it to some hyped up rock song from the 80’s with a guitar that they can both appreciate. They drive and the song changes, then changes, then changes again. Ronan is not talkative in the best of times, but he is even quieter than usual and the silence hangs between them like a curtain.

“Thanksgiving break begins on November 24th. I’ll visit then,” Adam says into the quiet.

“If you’re looking forward to leaving already, why the hell are you even going?” Ronan snarls out the window, but Adam hears _stay_.

“You know why,” he says. Chainsaw chirrups from the backseat and a down feather drifts by in the air conditioning. “I’m not leaving, I’m taking a break.”

Ronan’s fingers tighten on the steering wheel and Adam instantly regrets his choice of words.

“Not from us,” he says, “from Henrietta. From Glendower.”

From Cabeswater and magic after the quest had rubbed him raw and stripped him to his bones. Sometimes Adam isn’t sure if he still knows how to be human, much less a teenage boy.

“What state are we in?” Ronan asks after a minute, and Adam lunges at the phrase like a lifeline. It was offered as one. Adam looks down at his phone, something shiny and rectangular with lots of applications to tap that he’s still getting used to, and fiddles his way to the map function.

“Northern Conneticut,” he says, “near Nipmuck forest.” A sign flashes past, warning them about driving tired and Adam looks at Ronan. There’s something coiled under the calm that driving gives him, a tenseness in the lips and eyebrows that Adam can read as easily as words. There’s a mousetrap installed at the steering wheel and Adam knows better than to stick his hand in it. Ronan reaches down, leather cords hanging off his wrist, and taps the radio dial once.

“Go for it,” Adam says. If shitty music will make Ronan feel better about whatever it is that’s bothering him —a lie, Adam knows exactly what’s bothering Ronan— then he can have it. But instead of playing autotuned shrieking, Ronan somehow makes his way to a Celtic Rock channel. Adam didn’t know that those existed in America. The unfamiliar language slowly blurs out of his consciousness and the music, the rumbling, the early hour of departure, the sun drenched passenger seat, are all too much for him to overcome.

Adam wakes up with a jolt as Ronan pulls the car to a stop in the Harvard visitors lot. The music is still low. He stretches, and wipes a trail of tacky drool off of his chin. He has a seatbelt strap mark running all down the side of his face and rubs at it.

“I think you parked in two spots.”

“I didn’t know that you worked for the DMV,” replies Ronan. Chainsaw makes a little punctuating cackle from Ronan’s headrest, like she’s congratulating him or simply laughing at Adam’s face. The sun is high in the sky and the BMW’s air conditioner purrs against the summer heat. Adam pulls out the phone and taps slowly to his housing assignment. Either his fingers or his brain are muzzy with day sleep and it takes him longer than it should.

“We’re headed to Harvard Yard, I think. I’m in Massachusetts Hall. Room 402.” Adam is loose and sunny and his accent slips out before he can stop it, filling in the vowels and stretching the words like taffy. Ronan’s head cocks over to him and something in his eyebrows seems like a soft smile, but then he’s out the door. It slams behind him.

Adam exits more slowly and cracks his back again. Ronan did park in two spots, square in the middle like the most assholeish asshole to ever live. Adam sighs before following his boyfriend away from the obnoxious hulk of the car. Abruptly, he’s glad that they left Opal with Matthew at the Barns. The parking lot is a riot of activity: parents chasing their students, students escaping their parents, confused directions about where to move couches, endless numbers of milling people, at least one wandering golf cart, reuniting friends, awkward freshmen making anxious eye contact, and everyone so very concerned with appearances. It’s no place for a little girl with goat hooves.

“There’s a map,” Ronan says, pointing directly through a throng of people at a billboard across the way. The map is enormous, with yellow pins sticking into where, presumably, the Freshmen need to go. A man with a very large camera and a heavily perfumed woman jostle into Adam from behind as they crane their necks and he escapes as soon as he glimpses Harvard Yard. He can always ask someone else once there.

He returns to the car and opens the back. Now that he sees the state of some of the other vehicles, Ronan’s seems light in comparison. Contained to the trunk, at least. Adam grabs his bookbag, a dense leather thing gifted by Fox Way with innumerable pockets and a string of feathers tied to the strap, and slings it over his shoulder. Bookbag, sheets, shower caddy, trashcan filled with school supplies, bag of paraphernalia, clothes that Ronan’s carrying in a trashbag. There wasn’t much to move from Henrietta.

The load is bulky rather than heavy, so they make it out of the parking lot alive and in good time. Slightly mauled and worse for wear from the crowd, but intact. It’s not long before they get lost.

“Lets ask someone in here.” Adam says and ducks into the nearest building, looking around for an RA or a security guard or anyone, but the halls are empty. Ronan dumps the bag on the floor with a sharp thump and Adam jumps slightly.

“Maybe in here?” He says doubtfully. All of the doors look the same, intricately moulded wooden slabs covered in deep olive paint and gilding. There are no labels anywhere. Adam sets the trashcan down on the floor and knocks politely before pressing open the door.

It turns out not to be an office and Adam pulls his head back. He closes his eyes. Breathes through his nose.

“This has got to be a hotel. Ronan, there are marble bathrooms. What the hell.” Ronan sticks his head through the doorway.

“Huh.” He says, and pulls his head back out to face Adam. “Looks like Gansey’s mom’s bathroom.”

“What were you doing in Mrs. Gansey’s bathroom?” Adam asks, alarmed. Ronan shrugs. Adam despairs for the moral acuity of the economically viable.

“Gentlemen?” Someone coughs from behind Ronan and they both turn. An older woman is standing there, pantsuit prim and proper beneath her silver hair. Her eyes flicker at the sight of Chainsaw. “Can I help you?”

“Yes’m,” Adam says, pulling out every ounce of Southern Boy Charm™ he has. He senses that it’s needed. “We were just looking for someone to point the way to Massachusetts Hall. We’d be much obliged if you could help us.”

Her lips fall into a polished smile, the kind you’d see on tour brochures and help websites, and she steps forward to the door, heels clicking disapprovingly around the pile of Adam’s stuff in the center of the walkway. Ronan’s eyebrows are stuck permanently in flight mode.

“Well, it’s not in the girls’ bathroom. Three buildings to your right, a left at the pear tree, and another right three doors down.” She lingers, clearly wishing to supervise them out of the hallway and Adam gathers up his things. Ronan slings the trashbag over his shoulder and follows him out. The woman actually waits until they’re almost at the end of the walkway before she closes the door.

Adam can’t help it, as soon as they’re out of sight he’s laughing.

“What’s wrong with you?” Ronan says.

“She was judging us so hard,” Adam snorts, “for standing there with your ripped jeans and tattoo and my Walmart trashcan and then you and the Barns are worth more than the entire endowment of Harvard.”

“Am not,” Ronan says, but he flashes his teeth at Adam’s laughter.

“I haven’t been judged like that since we met Blue at Nino’s.”

“Since you made stupid bargains with forests.”

“Since my first days at Aglionby.”

“Since you were literally in front of a judge.” Adam shrugs easily, as if to say ‘you win’, and turns back to his bags, the smile still lurking around his mouth. Something in the day is making him giddy: the novelty or the sunlight or Ronan. The air fairly crackles with expectation.

Mass Hall turns out to be, unsurprisingly, a brick affair with white trim that reminds Adam forcibly of both the Salem Witch Trials and brownstone architecture. Ivy climbs one of the building’s faces, twisting away from an oak tree that bends over the chimney filled roof.

“Parrish,” Ronan says, “this is the platonic ideal of a college.” His head is tilted back at the same angle as Chainsaw’s, his gaze running over the building, hers over a squirrel in the branches.

“No kidding,” Adam mutters and hitches his bag up. He breathes once, hard, a quick in and out, and then walks up to the steps and through the door. At the end of the hall, a girl and what appears to be her extended family all attempt to maneuver a mattress through the tiny door. Adam debates helping, but adding another person would only cause pain. Ronan’s already up the stairs when he turns back around, leaning on the railing with his head cocked.

“You coming, Parrish?” He drawls and Adam’s face flushes slightly. Silhouetted by the windows and with Chainsaw stretching a wing for balance, Ronan almost looks like an angel. But angels don’t have tattoos or barbed-wire grins, and an angel would never look at Adam the way Ronan’s looking now.

Adam hurries up the stairs and bumps Ronan’s shoulder as he passes, brushing the backs of their hands together. He wishes he could drop what he’s holding and kiss him in the light. From the look on Ronan’s face, he wishes that too.

Room 402 sits halfway down the hall, across from a bulletin board and two doors from a water fountain. The door is closed.

“What do you think?” Adam asks. “Open it?” The bags dig into his shoulder and Adam is suddenly very aware of the plastic lip of the trashcan cutting into his hand.

“Unless you want to sleep in the hall,” Ronan replies and shoves the door open with his foot.

They look inside.

“Wow,” Ronan says. Adam agrees. The dorm room is about the size of his room at St. Agnes, only cleaner, with a taller ceiling, two large windows, and a plethora of Star Wars posters slapped along one half of the walls. Ronan starts laughing.

“Your roommate’s a fucking nerd.” Adam hits him in the shoulder. He hasn’t even spoken to his roommate yet. With no cellphone, Facebook account, or even a personal laptop, he hadn’t been able to contact who he was matched with. What a stellar first impression. Kylo Ren pouts at him from the headboard. On Adam’s half of the room, the bed is pressed up against the window and the desk is pressed against the footboard. It’s tight, but not as tight as Agnes had been. Not as tight as the trailer. Much tighter than Monmouth, but then Monmouth had been an enormous factory. Now it was Aglionby dormitories. Adam shakes himself.

“You wanna help?” He asks, but Ronan simply throws himself down on the BB-8 bedspread and snorts.

“I’ll watch, thanks.”

“Enjoy the view,” Adam says, and then begins to put his room in order. It is simple, and clean. Soft gray sheets and photographs. The phone Ronan had dreamt him. The school supplies he had bought. A birthday card from Blue. His tarot deck. They line against the windows, tiny marching pieces of his life.

“Adam,” Ronan says quietly, and Adam snaps back to himself.  Since Cabeswater vanished, Adam has been drifting off inside his head too often. Like he’s searching for something that isn’t there. He heaves his bag, containing all of his textbooks, onto the seat at his desk and claps his hands together.

“I think that’s it.” His room looks bare compared to the poster and merchandise filled other half, like he didn’t transplant enough of his life from Henrietta. If the walls had been whiter, Adam thinks, he could have claimed minimalism. As it is, it just looks empty. Chainsaw flutters to his bedpost and her claws sink into the wood, leaving mirrored gouges on the knob. Ronan shifts off the bed and stands, gazing cooly at Adam’s room for the next four months.

“Parrish,” he says, and Adam turns to look at him.

Ronan tosses something and Adam catches it double handed, unfurling his fingers to reveal a small glass vial. There are a scattering of seeds inside, all different colors and shapes.

“From the Barns,” Ronan says, hands shoved in his pockets. He won’t look at Adam. Chainsaw picks at something on the underside of her wing. “And from Cabeswater. To make your room less sad.”

It feels like Adam’s heart is a little too big for his chest. The vial in his hands suddenly seems precious as gold. Everything Ronan dreams is a gift, but Cabeswater belongs to them. In giving him this vial, Ronan has given him home.

Adam gently sets the vial aside on the bedspread and moves over to Ronan, grasping his shoulders before sliding his hands along Ronan’s neck. He feels a surge of pleasure that he gets to do this, that he is allowed to touch Ronan this way. His hands settle at the base of Ronan’s head and he curls his fingers slightly, nails catching on stubble. Their foreheads press together and their eyes close and Adam tries to put into it all of the thank yous that he has trouble saying out loud. When he pulls away, Ronan clears his throat gruffly but his eyes are soft.

“I don’t have any plant pots,” Adam says.

“You’re in college,” Ronan drawls, normality reasserting itself, “there’s plenty of pot to go around.”

Adam hits him on the shoulder and there’s a cough from the doorway.

“Are you Adam Parrish?” The boy standing in the doorway is small, with enormous ears and the drawn out spiral of California in his voice. He moves into the room and sticks out a hand exactly halfway between Adam and Ronan.

“I’ve been trying to get ahold of you, man, it’s like you live under a rock.”

Adam shakes his hand and the boy switches to focus on his face. “Well, no computer or cell phone will do that to you. You’re Brett, right?”

“Yeah. Did you grow up in a cult or something?” He looks personally insulted at the lack of technology.  

Adam’s mouth flickers at the corners. “Or something.”

"Wicked accent, man. Where are you fro— holy shit, that’s a bird!”

Ronan raises his eyebrows.

“Chainsaw.” He commands, and she hops onto his shoulder. Brett’s face is having a seizure, taking in the raven and Ronan and Ronan-and-the-raven and clearly not coming up with a response.

“Is this your—” He trails off, clearly unsure how to address them.

“Boyfriend.” Ronan slings an arm around Adam’s shoulders, oddly possessive in the face of this 5 foot nothing Star Wars nerd.

“Oh.” Brett’s eyes widen. “Oh! Cool, man, good with me.” He sticks his hand out again. There’s a lot of handshaking going around the dorm. Idly, Adam thinks it might be contagious.

“I’m Brett.”

“I know,” Ronan says and stalks outside. Brett’s hand hangs in the air. His ears look sad and surprised.

“Don’t worry,” Adam says, a little awkwardly, “he’s always like that.” There’s a silence. Brett seems to shake himself and then all is forgiven. The little miracles of Californians.

“So where’d you say you’re from?”

It goes relatively easily from there. There is an enormous Ronan shaped hole in the conversation and Adam is itching to head out the door to his boyfriend, but this is important and so he stays. Brett’s mouth is as big as his ears and Adam begins to zone out as he prattles on about the room (“Minimalistic. I like”), the weather, what kind of person he is, what his schedule’s like, what he’s studying, how he’s an Ally.

“Sorry,” Adam cuts in just before Brett launches into Star Wars, “I’m gonna go check on him.”

He wanders outside, feeling a little like he just got hit by a tiny truck, to find Ronan sitting against the wall, fingers curled into the back of his neck. Chainsaw pecks at his shoelaces. Adam sits next to him, stretching his legs out into the hallway. He sighs and Ronan looks up, raises an eyebrow, then flickers a quiet grin at Adam.

“Nerd.” Ronan says and Adam knows he’s not addressing him.

“Enthusiastic,” Adam corrects, and stretches. He’s forgotten what it feels like to be that fresh about anything. Most days he just feels aged and tired and empty after the riot of life that was Cabeswater. Ronan can make him feel new. Blue, on a good day. Gansey, once in a blue moon. His elbows pop and his fingers crack. Ronan tilts his head back into the wall.

“You’ll fit right in here, Parrish,” he says. His voice sounds old. “Sooner or later, you’ll forget all about me.”

Adam hits him lightly. That’s all he has to say on the topic.

“Come on,” Adam says, “let’s find the cafeteria. I’m buying.”

“Is this a date, Parrish?” Ronan says, eyebrow raised. “Because that’s a really shitty date idea.” Adam rolls his eyes and yanks Ronan to his feet, Chainsaw squawking at the shift.

“Says the man who thought tin foil was a good way to flirt.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“You’re lucky you’re pretty,” Adam says, pressing a kiss to Ronan’s cheek. He takes him by the hand, fingers locking together, and tugs Ronan away from the wall. Chainsaw makes a small rumbling noise, like she’s glad to be on the move again.

This time, when they pass by the windows, Adam takes full advantage of the backdrop.

 

The cafeteria looks like Hogwarts, to both of their surprise, candelabras and all. Ronan throws himself and his tray down across three different seats and Adam perches opposite in one. Chainsaw hops on the table between them, attempting to steal pieces of ham off of Adam’s plate and successfully begging them from Ronan.

“You’re a Slytherin,” Ronan says. “Clear as day.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” Adam replies. “Isn’t that the ferret-boy’s house?”

Ronan judges him quietly from behind a soda.

“Well, sorry, I didn’t exactly have much of a chance to read kid’s books.” Adam hates this, the tiny quiet reminders that his childhood was never quite normal. Even Ronan Lynch had read Harry Potter. He wonders if Gansey had ever had a Harry Potter phase.

“Which one’s the stupidly brave house?”

“Gryffindor,” Ronan replies, eyebrow raised.

"That’s you,” Adam says, draining his drink with a little more force than necessary. He flicks some ham to Chainsaw.

“Stop it,” Ronan says to her. “You’re going to get fat.”

Adam shakes himself. Ronan hadn’t meant to offend —and how drastic a change that is, Adam thinks, from a year ago— and here Adam was, spoiling the last moments they had in person until Thanksgiving.

The meal seems to take forever, each of them dragging it out as long as possible, and no time at all. Adam eats three plates of food, Ronan does the same, and then there’s getting coffee and lingering, then desert and loitering, then purposely ignoring the closest water fountains in order to go search for one farther (longer) away. Their feet drag. Slowly, they pull closer together, hands and arms and shoulders touching, lips meeting behind the dormitories, hands in hair in the gardens, hitched breaths by the parking lot.

They do not want to let go.

Ronan can stay. Ronan can wait until dark and drive through to morning. Ronan can stay with Adam. But if Ronan stays, he will stay the night, and then Opal will miss him and Matthew will worry and Adam’s nerdy roommate will hate them both.

Adam shifts on his feet.

“I’ll call.”

“I won’t pick up,” Ronan replies.

“Lying’s bad for the soul,” Adam says and kisses him. Ronan’s hands thread around his hips, holding them together, and then Adam is pressed up against the side of the BMW with Ronan’s hands in his hair and lips on his throat. Ronan tastes like desperation and his fingers feel a bit like fear and Adam pulls back to touch their foreheads together.

“Us.” He says. “Cabeswater, Opal, and us.” Ronan doesn’t reply, but his eyes soften around the corners. Adam thinks that he understands why Niall Lynch dreamed a wife that would never leave him. When the Lynchs love, they hold nothing back.

Ronan gets into the car and for a moment the world is only them, one on either side of the glass. Adam only looks at Ronan. He was never very good with handling emotions. Ronan looks back. Then Ronan rolls down the window so that his EDM plays loudly into the parking lot and Adam slaps the car roof with the flat of his hand and laughs.

When Ronan drives away, it doesn’t really feel like he’s gone.

Adam ends up using cafeteria bowls to hold Ronan’s plants, scrawling his best guess as to the species on the side in slanted sharpie. Something about using biodegradable bowls to grow dorm plants strikes him as unbearably hipster and _Blue_ , but something else feels good about it. Maybe the place where Cabeswater used to be. He really hopes that Ronan hasn’t given him anything larger than maybe a flower, because the bowls only hold about two handfuls of soil each. He really hopes Ronan hasn’t given him marijuana. What a fantastic way to be kicked out of Harvard.

Brett stops on his way out the door a few days later.

“Hey man,” he says, “are plants supposed to grow that fast?”

Adam looks up from his book at the bowls lining the windowsill, already with tall sprigs of leafy green in them. One of the plants is undeniably beginning to flower.

“Bamboo can grow a foot in a day,” he responds and Brett leaves it at that. Adam shifts closer to the plants and pokes the almost flowering one with his finger. Rapidly, it begins to twist and bulge, before breaking into a riot of deep violet petals surrounding an almost white-gold center. Adam jerks his hand back guiltily, but Brett has already left the room. This one is clearly from the Barns. Aurora’s window boxes had gone to seed during the Lynch family absence and now the meadows are filled with blazes of violet and fuchsia like these. Around the flower, the air seems to shimmer with the heat of a Virginia summer. Adam would not be surprised if it was. Ronan’s dreamings always had second layers.

The rest of the plants are different too. None grow out of their bowls, but all are fully mature within a few days. Snarled bushes and ferns frame flowers and a heavy white blossom opens a sticky sweet smell of hay and summertime into the air. Adam’s favorite is the tiny tree, a perfectly miniature oak in the corner of his window that actually drops acorns tinier than his smallest fingernail.

Every one of Ronan’s seeds grows, leaving Adam with a room dripping with greenery. The plants line up against the window, competing for light, and along his desk. They’re on top of his dresser and on his nightstand. He contains them to his half of the room, and it feels like a miniature forest. Sometimes, when Adam is almost asleep, the leaves will rustle above him and he thinks of Cabeswater before its unmaking. Ronan’s initial dream, full of crinkling wind and the smell of moss. None of the plants require water or seem to suffer when out of direct sun. Each does something interesting when Adam comes into contact with it. Vines wind around his fingers. Flowers bloom or fruits fall. A tiny grass sprig becomes suffused in sunlight. Dust motes and aphids crawl over the broad flat leaves.

When seated at his desk, Adam feels like the Barns are just outside his window.

Packages from Ronan and Fox Way and Gansey arrive almost weekly, slowly cluttering up Adam’s life in a way he’s never experienced before. The assembled detritus of love. Crystals and censing sticks, dreamcatchers and moon calendars and tarot decks from Maura and Jimi. Stormy, gruff notes from Calla, clearly written at Maura’s behest. Keychains and postcards from Gansey and Henry. Kitschy tourist junk from Mystery Spots from Blue, all magician themed. And from Ronan, whatever he had dreamt in the last days. Never-tangling headphones. A ring that acted as a dormitory keycard (Adam decides to ignore the implications of that piece of jewelry, though his heart trips a beat). Spell-check pens and cassette mixtapes that Adam can’t play. And then there are the photos. Dicky polaroids of Opal, of the Barns at sunset, of the outside of Monmouth and the dash of the BMW, of Ronan himself. Clearly taken by Opal, all of those pictures are either blurry with inexpert photography skills or with movement as Ronan scrambles to get the camera. Once, there is a selfie of Ronan and Opal; her chewing on his shirt and him looking straight into the camera, the blue mountains of Henrietta drifting behind them.

Adam frames it and puts it on his desk.

Sometimes, when he calls Ronan, neither of them will say anything and Adam will just listen to Ronan cooking, or working on a tractor, or (once) hatching a clutch of chicken eggs. Sometimes, Ronan will put him on speaker at the dinner table with Opal and Adam will be eating ramen from a coffee mug on his dorm room floor while the other two eat potatoes and macaroni and silverware and they’ll all have dinner together. Sometimes, Ronan will bite out that he’s busy and the call will end within fifteen seconds. Adam simply calls back later. There are unspoken rules to their communication: Adam always initiates the calls, but Ronan always, always picks up.

It’s three weeks into the school year —three weeks of Skype calls and texting and snapchats of Opal eating things really not meant for the human digestive tract— before the dream occurs.

Adam is deep inside Cabeswater, the blue green cool of the place washing over him, so different from the sticky hot summer of his dorm, and they have forgotten the unmaking. He is sitting in the crook of a tree, legs dangling down the trunk. Blue and Gansey’s voices come from just beyond his eyesight, with Henry pitching in every now and then. Adam cannot see him, but he knows Ronan is sitting against the trunk with Opal, trying to convince her not to eat mud. Noah is sitting with Ronan, knees tucked to his chin and a small smile on his face.

For a moment, everything is perfect. Then something moves beyond the treeline. A shifting, amorphous blackness that stinks of licorice and death. The air turns oily and fetid, waves of revulsion hitting Adam like a blow to the stomach. He is standing on the ground now, with no memory of leaving the tree, and  the grass curls and blackens, rocking up towards his feet like a ship’s deck. Gansey is gone, taking Blue and Henry with him. Ronan is standing as well, facing the blackness of the forest.

This is different from the demon’s work. Where there was a twisting, a corruption, now there is dissolution and nothingness, a fundamental subtraction. A hand sweeping wood chips off a table. Something in the forest is dense and writhing, sucking the trees into it. Adam can feel the roots like fingers cracking into the void. Breath will not come to his lungs.

“Gansey!” Adam shouts. “Blue! Henry!” But they are gone, twisted into the void and lost to him forever.

Ronan’s lips are white in a way Adam has never seen them in life.

“Where is Opal?” He says. “Adam, where is Opal?”

Beside them, Noah flickers in and out of existence, skull breaking through his features and his eyes are wild. Briefly, his face looks like someone else’s, large features terrified. Then there are only Ronan and Adam and the black hole in the forest. Cabeswater is already gone, Adam knows, but the dream twists that knowledge into the fear of it going. Adam’s eyes feel weak, his hands light. He looks to his left, but Ronan is gone. A horrible ringing emptiness descends on that side like a punch, or a staircase.

Sticky dark tendrils reach like shadows, snapping to Adam’s feet and creeping up his shins. Where they touch, he is erased until blackness is left, an eternal void without stars. It doesn’t hurt and the lack of pain shocks Adam into yelling. The black ascends. His knees vanish into the abyss and then his thighs. Around him, the trees buckle and twist. The sky drains of color. Chainsaw falls from somewhere high above, limp and lifeless, before vanishing beyond his feet. From the center of the blackness, there is a whispering: _nihil est nihil est nihil est_.

The void swallows Adam like the ocean until he gasps it into his lungs and into his heart and he is struck to the bone by ice that fractures him into a million spinning pieces. There is nothing, in all the world. Adam begins to doubt if Cabeswater was ever real, if he was ever real. His mind slips away into the black, bypassing the limits of his skin and muscle and diffusing across space and time. _Entropy_ , he thinks wildly, and then he thinks nothing at all.

In the very far distance, a single star is burning.

Slowly, and with much effort, it resolves into the human Persephone Poldama. The star sighs, like wind across the sea or a curtain scraping the floor, a wispy breathy noise that barely registers, and reaches for the section of void that was once Adam Parrish. She touches him and stars creep under his skin, filling him back into the shape of a boy, lining the inside of his body and keeping the blackness at bay. Adam feels himself burning, every nerve singing with white fire. His eyes are floodlights and suns. In his heart, he feels the dawn.

Persephone holds him in space, the stars give him form, and Adam slowly comes back to himself. His eyes open to Persephone and his lungs breath hydrogen. For a fragile moment, Adam stands on his own, his feet slipping in space until he finds purchase on some invisible stair. In all the nothing, there is only them.

She is different from when he last saw her. Then again, so is he. This Persephone is more in some way that he cannot see. She is calm and collected in a way that his Persephone was not. Aware in some way that his Persephone was not. For a moment they regard each other amid the infinite black. Her pale hand grazes his cheek and if he was a candle, then she is an inferno blazing with more heat than he can stand. In her eyes he can see galaxies.

“Magician,” Persephone says, her blonde hair a writhing mass in the intangible wind, “wake.”

Adam does so suddenly, in the way that one hits a brick wall or steps off a cliff. He was asleep, and then he was not. His head pounds behind his right eye and he lifts a hand that is brown and earthly to it. His head is a whirl of panic and fear, for Ronan, for Opal, for himself. He fights for control of his breath, gulping gasps trapped in the tiny room, and then picks up his phone.

Ronan answers on the first ring. Of course he was awake. Of course he was safe. He doesn’t say anything at first, so Adam does.

“Tell me about your day,” he asks, and Ronan must hear something off in Adam’s voice because he does so with no further questions, spinning a story about haystacks and sweaters and stubborn little girls and getting into fights in the supermarket parking lot. Adam tunes out the words and listens to Ronan’s voice only, matching his breath to the steady cadence until his head stops spinning.

“Thank you,” he says simply when Ronan has finished that story.

“You want to video call?” Ronan replies, voice deadly serious, but Adam says no almost before he finishes the sentence. Adam is a wreck right now, all bruised eyes and night sweats and tear tracks. This is not how he wants their video calls to be. And Brett is right there across the room. It wouldn’t be fair to have that much light in the room. It’s a miracle he hasn’t woken already.

“How is Opal?” Adam asks, and Ronan tells the story because he knows it is needed.

Adam calls Maura early the next morning and describes the vision to her. On the other end of the line, he can hear her lips pursing. She gives a considerate hum.

“Adam,” she says, “how much contact have you had with Blue and Gansey and them?” Adam admits, honestly, that it’s hardly anything at all these days.

“And what’s your workload like?” Adam isn’t sure that he likes where Maura is going with this, but he tells her anyway. It’s just this side of crushing.

“Do you often have caffeine before bed?” And Adam stops her there, because this was not a nightmare fueled by his insecurities about his drifting friendships and too much Redbull, thank you very much.

“I know what a vision feels like,” he says, “this wasn’t a dream.” There is something very un-psychic like about this disbelief, Adam thinks, but very motherly. Maura hums again and asks him about his classes, but offers nothing more on the subject.

Adam calls Gansey as well. He can’t help himself. It’s with a pang of loss that he realizes he cannot contact Noah, doesn't need to, but then the ringer ends and Gansey hasn’t picked up and Adam’s heart skyrockets to thump in his throat. He calls Blue with deep breaths and rueful smiles and his long fingers tap while he waits for her to pick up. One ring. Two. Another. Another. Another.

The voicemail has a similar effect on Adam’s breathing as a live tiger. He taps in Henry’s number with shaking hands and has to redo it when he trembles an 8 instead of a 5. His shoulders round under the weight of fear. Logically, with Ronan and Opal safe and Maura unworried, there should be nothing amiss. There is nothing amiss. Nothing is wrong, except Adam’s vision. His friends are fine. His head buzzes so that he hardly hears the ringer. Once. Twice. Three times, and then—

“Hello,” Gansey’s voice says, gravelly and out of breath.

“Gansey.” Adam breathes.

“Adam?” Gansey replies and then turns away from the phone. “Quit it you two, Adam’s calling.”

“I just wanted to check in. Sorry to disturb you all.”

“What? No, we were just getting ready for breakfast.” Gansey clears his throat. In the background, Adam can hear Blue laughing —“Stop it, Cheng!”— and what sounds like two bodies hitting the floor.

“Hey Adam,” Henry shouts from across the room, “did you know that Blue here has an exceptionally fine pair of—"

“Eyes,” Gansey cuts in over the sound of Blue decking Henry. (“I was going to say that!”) “What can I do for you?”

“Where are you right now?” Adam says. Every word that Gansey speaks in that old Virginia accent calms him.

“Florida,” he replies and Adam doesn’t know how Gansey does it, but he manages to sound unerringly polite and horrifically disdainful at the same time. Adam can only picture him in the land of retirement and alligator wrassling, mosquitos divebombing every inch of exposed skin.

“Jane wants to see the Everglades,” Gansey explains and his tone softens completely. “And Henry wants to visit Universal Studios.” Adam can tell that this last has been a topic of discussion by the groove worn in Gansey’s voice. In the background, there’s an immense thump and then a guilty quiet. Gansey sighs.

“One moment,” he says and then there’s a click as he puts the phone down. His voice is faded but still audible. “Henry, put your shirt back on. Jane, just go wash it out of your hair. I’ll cancel breakfast. Sorry Adam,” he returns, “I’m going to have to handle this. You can call back later?”

“Yeah,” Adam says, “Bye, Dad.” Gansey groans good-naturedly and then the call ends. The phone feels heavy in Adam’s hand and as he stands, a wave of exhaustion hits him. Brett is just sitting up in the bed opposite, leaning against the wall as he nurses an apparently extreme hangover.

“Whazzat?” He mumbles and Adam shakes his head before tossing a bottle of water at his roommate. Brett raises it in a pained toast as Adam shuffles out of the room.

“You’re lucky it’s Saturday,” Adam says, not unkindly, and then he heads into the common area to make himself a bagel. Brett slouches into the lounge just as Adam is cleaning the plate, looking marginally more alive and infinitely more injured by sunlight.

“I had the weirdest dream about you last night, dude,” he says as he drops himself down onto the couch, arm flung over his eyes. “You like, died and I tried to do something but you were totally gone. And then you started glowing and levitated a bit and then thumped back onto the bed and woke up. Dunno, man, I don’t usually dream after parties but that was sick.”

In the sink, Adam’s hands freeze under the water stream. So it was a vision. And Persephone had affected him in the real world.

“That’s weird. Hey,” he says, affecting a casual voice, “d’you mind if I take the room today? I’ve got an essay I need to spread out for.” He dries the plate and puts it back in the cupboard.

“That’s cool,” Brett says, “I’m going out with Ming all day.” Adam pretends he knows who Ming is and nods. Brett winks in return, leaving Adam vaguely discomfited.

Back in the room, Adam touches magic for the first time since arriving at Harvard. He takes yet another cafeteria bowl and plucks a pen from a nearby plant pot, breaking it into the water to darken it for scrying. He hesitates. The dreamworld should be safe, but… He texts Ronan, knowing that it will take a long while for him to respond to anything but a call, and then sinks to the floor, legs folded under. The bowl of water glistens in front of him, oddly ominous for it being made of cardboard. He leans his spine against the leg of his bed, grounding himself.

The last time— the last time he did this, it had been during the unmaking of Aurora Lynch. He’s not even certain that this will work, he’s so far from the leyline. Tarot isn’t much of anything but commonsense and visions are something else entirely, but purposeful scrying might be beyond him without Cabeswater. Then again, he’s good at this. The magic of it thrums behind his breastbone, a trapped bird in a cage. He breathes, and focuses on that feeling until it’s all that he knows, then lets it fly through his palms and his eyes and the bowl of water resolves into something far more than ink. A flat glassy expanse of indigo stretches around him in all directions. In the distance, there lurk what might be swirling shapes, but Adam's eyes won’t focus on them.

“Persephone,” he calls. Inside his head, there are no walls, and his voice falls flat and close without the echo. “Persephone!”

There’s no answer. Adam lurches slightly and looks down to discover that his heels have sunk into the plain. A Newtonian fluid. He steps forward, ground firm under his action, and sinks again. He starts to walk, calling for Persephone as he goes. It’s not quite a treadmill, but it’s close. The shapes never resolve to more than haze and Adam quickly loses track of all time. Has he been here a minute? An hour? All day? He looks down to discover that the floor has swallowed him to mid calf. What was he doing? He has to keep moving, but he can’t remember why.

“Persephone.” He says, quietly just under his breath. The meaning of the word tickles just on the outskirts of his brain. He has the feeling that it is incredibly important, but can’t remember why. Something touches his head and he flinches wildly.

A hand ruffles through his hair. In his ear speaks a luminous voice, one that he maddeningly almost knows.

“The dream world is corrupted, little magician. Head back to your light.” In the distance, orange-pink crackles bloom into existence, like sideways lightning.

He wakes to the sound of a furiously ringing phone. At the moment, he can’t remember his own name, but something inside him thinks _Ronan_ and the phone opens through sheer muscle memory and desperation.

“—rish? Parrish? Fucking answer me you goddamn idiot, I— Adam?” Adam responds, but it comes out as more of a groan. It feels like someone has put a knife between his eyes. He brings a hand to his cheekbone and his fingers come away covered in something sticky and blue-black.

“Ronan,” he rasps and it comes out staticky and all vowels.

“Video call,” Ronan commands, leaving no room for objection, and Adam’s shaky darkened fingers tremble to tap the camera. When Ronan sees him, the other boy sucks in a short breath. In the viewfinder, Adam’s eyes are streaked with a thick layer of dark. Tears of ink.

“I could feel it,” Ronan says. “When you entered the space where the forest is supposed to be.”

Adam suddenly feels cold. Cabeswater is gone, vanished like nothing, and Adam stepped into the raw scraping dreamstuff left behind. He remembers his text and feels hollow. Ronan had obviously seen it. What would that have made him feel, Adam thinks, being hours away? The pain in his head lances through his skull, coiling in his shoulders. His hands feel gritty and dry.

“I hate it,” Ronan snarls and there’s something of a trapped panther in the way he paces. “I hate not being able to get to you.”

“I was going to check for Persephone,” Adam says feebly and the panther rounds on him, claws out.

“Fucking found her did you? Fucking communed with her?”

“She was there,” Adam defends himself. He clears his throat with a wet burble. “Or, I think she was. I can’t— I’m not sure.”

There’s a frozen silence.

“Persephone is dead,” Ronan says finally.  “That’s all there is to it.”

Ronan looks up from the screen, eyes hooded. His pupils are tight with fear.

“God, Adam, the dead don’t come back. No matter how much we might want them to. We were lucky with Gansey.”

“But—”

“You’re responsible for more than just yourself now,” Ronan snarls. “What about Opal?” _What about me?_    

“I didn’t think it would be dangerous,” Adam says, getting his feet back under himself.

“And look at your face,” Ronan snorts. Fear gives way to anger. “What did you think was gonna happen?”

“Like you’ve never done anything dangerous in the dreamscape.”

“I haven’t, Parrish, not when people are counting on me. Not without asking first.”

“I don’t need your permission to live,” Adam snaps. “You’re not my father.” It’s not the right thing to say at all, but Adam feels stupid and guilty and disoriented. On the screen, Ronan blinks, a tiny flinch. Then he’s back and made entirely of barbed wire and glass.

“At least I knew where you were in the trailer park!”

The ink has dried tight on Adam’s skin. Some of it flakes off his waterline and he blinks hard.

“I’m not some pet you can keep on a leash, Ronan. You can’t just yank me to your side when you want me.”

“Where the fuck did that come from?!” Adam’s breathing hard and his head is a whirl. This is an old argument, one he’s using as a shield. His mind is still on Persephone’s fingers in his hair. The oozing black that ate Cabeswater. The distant shapes in the dark.

“I have my own life, Ronan. I can make my own decisions. If you can’t give me that, then maybe you should just leave me alone.” Ronan goes very still on screen.

“Fine,” he says. “Fine, Parrish. This wasn’t working anyway.”

Adam’s reflection in the ended call screen is dark and tilted crazily. His eyes are vanished among the indigo paint, swallowed up by the phone glass. He sucks in a shaky breath. Ronan’s parting line plays in his head again and then his heart is in his throat. Surely, Ronan didn’t mean—

Adam scrambles to call back, apologies bubbling in his throat, crowding his tongue up with emotion.

Ronan doesn’t pick up. Adam hangs up rather than leave a voicemail. He curses violently, words he’d learned from Ronan. He slams one of the plants off his desk and it goes flying to the floor. But the bowl is cardboard and soil and flower and nothing breaks, only bounces limply, and Adam’s hands hang at his sides, twitching weakly. His eyes track randomly around the room. There’s too much fear in his chest, too much boiling up into his skull, a nameless pressure bruising his ribcage. He looks at the ceiling and tiny droplets of ink fall from his chin into his collar.

From behind him, there’s a knock at the door.

“You cool, Adam?” Brett asks. “I heard yelling.” Adam doesn’t turn around, instead raising a hand to his head, long knuckles burying in his hair.

“Yeah,” he says emotionlessly, “I’m fine.”

Nothing can be fine. Not when he might have lost Ronan. _Forever_ , his mind hisses at him and Adam squashes that thought relentlessly. He scrambles for something to say to Brett.

“I thought you were out with your girlfriend,” Adam says, still not turning around.

“I was,” Brett replies. “It’s dinner time. You sure you’re okay, man?”

Adam mutters an affirmative and Brett doubtfully moves off. Gansey would have pressed it. Blue too. Ronan wouldn’t have stopped until he’d steamrolled all over the problem and beaten it into submission. They’re all so very far from here.

He hasn’t eaten since the bagel that morning, but all of a sudden he’s not hungry at all.


	2. Week from Hell & It's Only Thursday

It takes two days for Brett to realize that Adam’s not eating and twenty minutes after that to march him from the library to the Dining Hall and sit an enormous plate of Shepherd’s Pie in front of him.

“Eat,” he says, sitting backwards on a chair with his hands folded on the seat back, chin on his fingers. “Or I’m gonna make you, dude.”

Adam huffs, fingers twitching from the muscle memory of typing his latest essay. “This is unnecessary. I’m fine. Can I go, please? I need to finish Gaudiano’s covalent bonding piece.”

“First food, then work.” Brett cocks his head and Adam is suddenly and achingly reminded of Noah. “You don’t have, like, an eating disorder do you? That would suck ass, man.”

“I’m fine.” Adam repeats, “Just not hungry.”

“This is about that phone call argument, isn’t it?” Brett asks. “Just call again and apologize. It’s not that hard.”

Adam closes his eyes for a moment. When he opens them, Brett is still there, staring expectantly at him. The other boy looks nothing so much like a golden retriever who thinks a game of fetch will make all of life’s problems go away. Adam, looks away and toys with his mashed potatoes, stirring the peas around in little tracks that remind him of doing donuts outside of Monmouth. He stops.

“He’s not picking up.” It hurts to say it out loud, like every unanswered ring in his head at once. The churning fear swells in his stomach again and Adam pushes the food away. Brett shoves it back.

“Eat half the plate, Adam,” he says, and now Adam can see the real worry in his eyes, “and talk to someone. If not me, then someone you trust.”

Adam raises a forkful of mashed potatoes to his mouth, then looks at Brett and then the door meaningfully. Brett, of course, leans back in the chair with his hands behind his head and only grins. Above the grin, though, his eyes stay locked on Adam’s fork until half the plate is gone.

The piece for Gaudiano goes much quicker with more energy and Adam’s traitorous stomach whispers a thank you to Brett. Every time his phone dings —an email, a weather alert, an update to the Intro Chem group chat— his heart jumps into his throat. When the scale tips from time spent writing to time spent on his phone, Adam closes his laptop and swings his bag over his shoulder.

Outside the library, the night air is crisp and sharp with late September and the lights throw orange glares on the grassy lawn. A handful of students stagger drunkenly back to their dorms across the street, high heels dangling off of fingers and dorm keys clutched in hands. Adam leans on a railing, the cool metal on his elbows clearing away the last webs of covalent molecular bonding. The stars are largely blocked out by heavy clouds, thick with autumn.

He taps the phone against his palm, weighing the call. A single, well rehearsed tap in the contact list and then Adam’s listening to the rings, counting them off in his head. There will be nine if the call is unanswered. On the fourth ring, it’s picked up.

“What?”

“Blue,” Adam breathes, “I need help.”

“I’ll get Gansey up,” she says, instantly awake, and Adam almost yelps a negative. _Don’t break him_ , Gansey’s voice says in his mind, and Adam feels a terrible well of guilt on top of the fear.

“No, please don’t. I wanted to talk to you anyway.”

“Oh?” She says and he can _hear_ her raised eyebrow. “Well, fancy that, Adam Parrish calling for little old me.” He winces. He’s been… busy lately and when he does call, it’s always Gansey that picks up and they end up talking the entire time with only summary passes to Blue and Henry.

“I’m sorry about that. I— How are you?”

“Fine, thank you,” she says, and her tone softens audibly. “But you didn’t call at 3 am for me.”

“Shit. I’m sorry, I’ll call again later.”

“I’m already awake, Adam.” He can hear her rustling around —picking up a jacket maybe?— and then moving out the door so as not to disturb the boys. “What’s up?”

“Blue, I messed up so bad. With Ronan. I can’t— I did something and—”

“Oh, I heard,” she says, “two days ago, when Ronan called me and panicked for an hour. I don’t know why you both called the person who literally killed her true love for romantic advice. If it’s because I’m a girl, you’re getting nothing for Christmas.”

“Ronan was panicked?” Adam asks, a slow tremulous warmth suffusing his heart. “About what?”

“What do you think? He thought you were leaving him.”

“What?” Adam’s heart drops like a stone into the ground beneath him. How could Ronan honestly think Adam would ever walk away? “What did you say?”

“That you two are the sweetest, ickiest, most vomit inducing couple I have ever seen —and I’m currently dating Gansey— and that he had nothing to worry about.”

“But then, why would he think—”

“Adam,” she says, “coming as someone who has, in fact, dated you, you are an incredibly difficult person to work with.”

There’s a solid ten seconds of silence as Adam tries to work out the proper response to that.

“You don’t like being wrong, you don’t like being told what to do, and quite frankly, you’re terrible at collaboration. You’re proud, and willful, you think rather than feel, and you’re so wrapped up in yourself and your own problems that you don’t empathize with other people.”

Adam feels attacked.

“But I—”

“That’s how I would describe you,” Blue says, “a year ago.”

She sighs and Adam can hear the 3am in her voice. From across the line, he can make out the sounds of a nearby highway. Gansey has formed a habit of checking into the sketchiest motels he can find, Blue has told him, partly out of naiveté and partly for the aesthetic. Adam is slightly approving at the unprecedented thrift and mostly worried for their safety.

“Now, you’re devoted, you’ve gotten over yourself, and you’re willing to compromise when you know it’s for the best.” She pauses, long enough that Adam feels like he needs to say something.

“Thanks?”

“But you still have difficulty looking outside your own problems.”

“What do you mean?”

“Boys.” Blue says irritably, and stomps her feet for warmth. “None of you are raised right. How do you think Ronan’s feeling with us gone, you so far away and having an entirely different friend group, and then being the only one left in Henrietta? And also being a single parent for the first time since Opal showed up?”

“Overwhelmed?” Adam asks slowly. Blue give a very particular sigh.

“Go talk to him.” She says, voice low and catchy with early morning air. “If he doesn’t pick up the phone, go see him in person. It’ll be good for my goddaughter anyway. Now goodnight, Adam.”

He mumbles some response and she hangs up halfway through, leaving him staring at his phone screen blankly. His eyes flick to the clock on his phone and his entire body sags with the realization that, without meaning too, he’s pulled another all-nighter. The sun is just beginning to pull above the horizon, washing gray light over the courtyard.

He looks at his phone, the yard, considers going back to his dorm to sleep for the two hours until his next lecture, considers missing his next lecture, and then pushes himself off of the railing. His sweater rasps over his dry skin and Adam sighs. His eyes are full of grit and his hands are empty of coffee. He needs to fix that, he muses quietly, and slips away from the library.

Campus is ghostly this early in the morning, students and teachers alike just beginning to stir themselves awake. The cashier’s face is pale and wobbly with morning when Adam buys his coffee —a double espresso shot— and the only other person in line has ordered something unendurably complicated and sugary.

The barista hands her her drink and she turns to get a straw, only to freeze and squeak at the sight of Adam. He blinks slowly, not really processing what’s going on as she fumbles with her drink. A blush shoots up into her cheeks and her free hand pats her ponytail frantically.

“Good morning, Adam,” she says. He vaguely remembers her from his Chemistry class. Her name is Nancy… Netai… Nerissa. His brain isn’t really working this time of day.

“G’morning,” he says and his smile turns into a yawn. God, he really needs coffee. She turns to put the straw in her drink, indirectly revealing the name Neya on the side of her cup. He shakes himself. The barista puts his order out and he seizes it gratefully.

He’s just about to turn and leave when she asks him about the upcoming Chem test.

“I could really use a tutor,” she says, messing with her ponytail a bit, “and you’re really good at, well, everything, so I was wondering if—“

“I could recommend someone? Sure, Neya.” Adam says, stifling another yawn. He racks his mind for someone in the tutoring program who could help her. “You should try Ed Wheeler, he’s good at explaining concepts.”

For some reason, her face flickers a little. She takes a sip of her coffee, the sea of whipped cream descending slightly in the cup.

“Yeah. I will. Thanks, Adam.”

“No problem,” he says, and goes out the door. It’s only halfway down the walkway outside and three sips of caffeine in that he realizes what she was really asking. He freezes mid step and makes a dime turn back into the café, where she’s just exiting the door.

There’s a momentary fumble where their coffees almost go all over each other, but it sorts itself out.

“Sorry,” Adam says, “were you asking me—”

“Yeah,” she says, a small smile cracking on her face. “Though I’m not so sure I want you as a tutor now if you didn’t get that.”

“It’s barely 6am and I didn’t sleep last night, cut me some slack.” Neya reminds him of Blue, a little bit, if Blue had glasses and the backbone of a mouse. So really, nothing like Blue at all. He needs to have more girls in his life.

“The test is next Tuesday, right?”

She nods. She’s playing with her hair again and Adam frowns, trying to see if there’s a knot or something stuck in it. There isn’t.

“I can help you tomorrow? And maybe Friday as well??”

“That’s great!” She says, a little too enthusiastically. “Is 7:00 good, we could do it over dinner?”

Adam pauses, certain pieces clicking together in his head neatly. Oh. Suddenly, he feels like an idiot for it taking this long. But then again, neither Blue nor Ronan had flirted like this. They were more action oriented.

“I was thinking more like 5:00?” Adam says carefully. “It’s just, I usually Skype my boyfriend, Ronan, at 7:00.”

Neya’s good mood pops visibly. Her smile flickers slowly from her face.

“Right. 5:00. In the library?” Adam nods and she makes an effort to grin, before muttering a goodbye and slinking around the corner. Adam stares after her, bemused. Though nothing’s his fault, he still feels kind of sorry for her. He hopes he put up a better show than that for Ronan.

Ronan. His mood immediately dovetails. He sips at his coffee. This is not their first fight, not by half. This isn’t even their worst fight. It just happens to be one that they can’t work through face to face. Avoidance is all too easy from 500 miles away.

He taps the number in again, fingers unconsciously moving over the familiar pattern, and holds the ringing phone to his ear. The courtyard is gray-blue and reminds him of the air inside Cabeswater. Anything seems possible.

Ronan doesn’t pick up his phone.

Adam tells himself that Ronan is still sleeping, ignoring that he full well knows that farmers get up ridiculously early, ignoring that Ronan hardly sleeps.  He hangs up rather than leave a message. He misses them. It’s only been three days since they last spoke, but it feels like ages.

His phone beeps at him, a signal to get to class, and Adam drags himself along the sidewalk. A wave of students just exits the cafeteria as he passes, catching him up in the press forward and Adam lets himself be pushed. The crowd is on all sides, raucous on the right and silent on the left, and they drop Adam at a split in the path like leaves in the wind. They go right and he takes the left alone.

He’s the first one into the lecture hall, even before the teacher, and he picks the lefternmost seat at the front. He quickly checks his email, brand-new social media, shoots off a reply to a classmate’s question, and then just sits. The hall is enormously quiet.

He doodles letters into the corner of his notebook, APL, and a tiny drawing of Opal in the margin. He can’t get her mouth right, the sly side smirk she took from Ronan, and he scribbles a line through her face, blotting her out with black. He remembers his dream and reaches for an eraser instead.

“That was pretty good,” a deep voice says from behind him, “why are you erasing it?”

“Can’t get it right,” Adam says, flipping the book closed. “Good morning Ezra.”

Ezra Day is Gansey in negative. One of the dark-skinned middle sons of a Democratic Senator, drifting through life on Philosophy and Art, lackadaisical to the extreme. 

“Who’s speaking today?”

Adam shrugs, a quick side motion. Dr. Mitchell, for a Harvard Professor, did very little teaching, preferring to leave it in the capable hands of guest lecturers.

“They’re going to be late, though.” Adam says.

“Was there a notice? I didn’t see.”

Adam shrugs, putting away everything not related directly to Population Evolution Patterns of Galapagos Finches. “I just have a feeling.”

Ezra hums and then grabs Adam’s notebook and sketches a rather good, yet wildly unflattering caricature of their professor on one of the back pages. Students blow in through the door and get caught on seats, tucking away in little clusters, muttering to each other and to their coffee about the state of the world in general. A periodic litany of “G’morning, Adam”, “Hi Adam”, and “Can I sit here?” leaves the entire front left filled with sleepy young adults. Someone runs in with a plank of wood, quickly laid across several seats in the front row, and spreads a handful of recording devices over it: all the students by proxy who couldn’t be bothered getting out of bed at 7:30.

The speaker is late, as Adam said.

When she rolls in close to 8:00, Ezra jabs him in the shoulder blade and flashes a laconic thumbs up. Adam grins and the TA shouts for order as the speaker apologizes...

Despite his best efforts, Adam finds his head turning to Ronan and Opal. It would be time to harvest the sweet potatoes at the Barns. Ronan had planted a field for kicks, and because Opal liked the purple and orange colors. Adam’s suddenly struck by an image of Opal, hooves ground down into the earth, trying to pull out a potato vine as big as herself. He doodles a tiny version in the margins of his notebook.

The lecturer clicks a slide of finches onto the screen and Adam is reminded of Chainsaw in the hooked beaks and glossy feathers. She joins Opal, a little oversized on the paper. Ronan sits cross legged just below them, looking up under his brows, and gradually the little doodles take over his entire paper. Adam’s just adding vines around a section of Cabeswater when he realizes that the people around him are packing up and moving out. He shakes his head, like someone surfacing from water, and looks up to find the TA staring down at him with arms crossed.

“What’s your name?” She asks.

“Adam Parrish,” he replies, blinking under the force of her glare, and unconsciously sits up straighter. She reminds him a little of Helen Gansey with the ramrod posture and he swallows.

“Mr. Parrish, if you’re going to sit in the front row, please pay attention.”

“Sorry,” he says, and then reflexively,“ma’am.” His hand slams down on the doodle of Ronan, covering it from view.

“We expect better of our Harvard students, Mr. Parrish. Don’t throw away your education.”

Something inside Adam dies a little at her words and he packs up his bags under her watchful eyes, slinking away and feeling like shit. Ezra is lounging by the door, waiting for him and they walk together.

“Don’t sweat it man,” Ezra says, “the lecture was easy anyway and there were thirty people who never showed up.”

“Thanks,” Adam says miserably. His brain takes the opportune moment to remind him that there’s a good chance that those doodles will be the closest he’ll get to the Barns ever again. Ronan. Adam feels worse than before. The physical ache of missing them has settled into his stomach, a knotted dense feeling that lies heavy. He misses Opal’s voice and continuous Latin chatter. He misses Ronan’s snark. His secret kindness. His lips.

Whoever said “familiarity breeds contempt” had obviously never met Ronan Lynch. Knowing him has been the best experience of Adam’s life.

Ezra mutters at him sympathetically and wanders off to some other corner of the campus. Adam’s phone beeps at him, telling him to hoof it to Chemistry and he does, his brain replaying the TA’s disappointed face on loop.

Step. We expect better. Step. Don’t throw it away. Step. The very least you could do. Adam’s throat feels coated with lead.

The rest of the day proceeds in skips and slides and almost misses. He almost forgets to slide his Covalent Bonding paper into the tray. He almost misses a question on the worksheet. He almost adds the wrong concentrate to the solution and ruins his experiment. He narrowly avoids walking into a tree on his way to the cafeteria. Once there, the person in front of him takes the last slice of pizza and he orders it anyway. 

Adam’s mind is simply somewhere else.

Adam leans against a hedge instead of a wall, nearly swallowed by the foliage as he chases his rapidly sinking backpack. When he scrambles his way out, covered in bits of twig and leaf, the hedge has somehow blossomed with dozens of tiny white flowers. He waves weakly at a handful of staring students and walks away quickly, ignoring the confused exclamations about the only blooming bush on campus.

Wednesday passes in a horrific blur. Adam’s coffee is first mishandled, then spilt on him. He rolls his ankle while hustling across the quad, leading to a truly embarrassing stumble dance of balance. There are no seats in the library, which forces him back into the dorm where the AC has mysteriously broken down overnight. Ronan still doesn’t respond. Even Adam’s Snapchats and Instagram messages are unread.

 

“There’s nothing else you can do man,” Brett says, hanging upside down off of his bed and trying to bribe himself to do work with skittles. “Besides literally showing up at his house.”

Adam doesn’t respond, too busy figuring out if Ronan’s Snapchat of Opal eating a truck tire means there’s a chance at redemption.

“I’m going for a walk,” Brett says, abandoning the pack of skittles (and the worksheet).

“Wait,” Adam says, and holds out an umbrella to Brett. It’s old, bent, faded, and looks like nothing so much as a feather duster with mange, but it works. Adam’s had it as long as he can remember. “Take this. It’s going to rain around one.”

Brett looks out the window at the sun streaked yard and stares at Adam, who doesn’t look up from his phone.

“You’re joking, man,” Brett says, “there’s been sun predicted all week.”

“Just take it,” Adam sighs, arm still outstretched. Brett shrugs and slips the frayed strap on his wrist before sliding towards the door. He knocks on the wooden frame once.

“Don’t spend all day in here waiting, Adam,” he says, “I mean it.”

Adam hums in acknowledgement, and then Brett is out the door.

At 1:06 PM, a sudden wind from the Northeast pushes a band of clouds down and dumps rain all over Cambridge.

At 4:45, it still hasn’t abated and Adam is seriously regretting giving his only umbrella to Brett. It’s wet and cold when he makes his way to the library, a serious shift in weather that paves the way for a true East Coast winter. The inside is warm and well lit and Adam would probably sell his soul or make a deal with another sentient forest for a cup of coffee.

Neya gets swept in by the storm a few minutes after 5:00, wind tousled and wet haired, her coat collar blown up crazily by the wind. Again, Adam is reminded forcibly of Blue. She sits with a long exhale and kicks her shoes off, sticking her feet on another chair.

She looks at Adam, long enough that he fidgets. Her pupils are wide from the early dark outside and she ducks her head when he looks at her.

“Are you going to be okay with this?” Adam asks her, a little awkwardly.

“Yup,” Neya says resolutely, “I ate half a sleeve of Thin Mints and watched Notting Hill and now I’m good to go. So, stoichiometry is the coefficient variables in a balanced reaction?”

“Not exactly,” Adam says, pulling a piece of paper over to them. “It’s more about matching the mass of reactants and molecular weights.”

It takes the entire two hour period, a dozen pieces of paper, and countless diagrams, but by the end of it, they both understand stoichiometry much better.

“I feel like my brain’s been run through a meat grinder,” Neya says, pressing the palms of her hands into her eyes. “This is ridiculous, I’m in advanced abstract algebra and probability theory, why is this so hard?”

“Demons?” Adam offers, and she laughs softly. She sits back in her chair, shoving paper away from her.

“I need to think about something else right now. Something not number related. Tell me about the guy who managed to win Adam Parrish’s heart.”

Ronan. Adam flickers, unnameable affection battling with the damper of their current fight. The affection wins, much deeper rooted and older. His eyelids flicker down and a small smile etches its way onto his face.

“Well,” he says, stretching out the word into a heavily Virginian drawl, “he’s a farmer, has about a hundred acres of land about a mile from my hometown, and his daughter, Opal, she’s fantastic, I mean, disobedient as all get out, but—“

Neya has a bit of a funny look by the time he’s done, but she’s wearing a smile too.

“He sounds great,” she says. “Where on earth did you two meet?”

“He graduated from my high school,” Adam says, thanking the gods that Ronan actually has a diploma.

“High school sweethearts,” Neya sighs and Adam almost chokes at the dreamy look on her face. Somehow, he’d had her pegged as a hopeless romantic.

“Not quite.”

“Hush. Where’s he going to college?”

“He’s not,” Adam says. “He took over the farm after his father died.” A small stretch of the truth, but Adam gets a flash prediction of trying to explain the Gansey/Glendower/Greywaren thing and decides that he’d rather not be dragged into a padded cell.

That funny look has come back over Neya’s face, but she doesn’t say anything, rather looking at the clock.

“I’d better let you get back to him, then. Have a good night, Adam, and thank you so much. Say hi for me.”

“Will do,” Adam smiles, and tries not to think about how Ronan won’t pick up. He sits at the library table for a long while after Neya leaves. His phone feels heavy in his pocket. Four days of unanswered calls. Four days of unsent texts and snapchat messages and struggling to find the right words to apologize. Four days of fear at the answer and no voicemail messages.

Adam always knew he was a coward, but the proof of it scrapes raw.

He heads back to the dorm early, intent on sleeping his way through to tomorrow. Brett is out and the room is dark, the rain sheeting down outside the window. It sounds like the deep parts of Cabeswater, the rough, natural background that often shone through Ronan’s creations. Ronan.

Adam wonders what Ronan’s doing right now, if he’s sitting awake in his room or chasing Opal to get to bed or if he’s simply abolished bedtime all together and let them romp all night in Adam’s absence. Destroyed all the carefully cultivated rules.

It’s with a downturned smile that Adam realizes that he was the Bad Cop of the family.

Ronan’s voice message recording is simply “Declan, fuck off. Not Declan, still not calling you back” but it’s almost enough for Adam to just hear his voice. Adam’s thumb declines to leave a voicemail almost out of habit. He just wants to hear Ronan’s breathing. Just that. That would be enough.

A dull ache settles above his eyes. Intensely, Adam misses home. It takes him a long while to fall asleep.

 

On Thursday morning, Adam wakes up convinced that Cabeswater is with him again. The plants above his head rustle, rain beats against the window, and something stirs in the empty backrooms of Adam’s mind, ancient and green and slippery like moss. It feels like an old coat, one with a familiar hole in the sleeve and finicky drawstrings pulled just right.

Then the coat melts away into the walls of his dorm room and Adam’s entire body shivers. His throat feels sticky. His joints throb. Adam allows himself exactly two minutes of staring at the ceiling and ignoring the world and then heaves himself into a sitting position, which turns out to be an enormous mistake as his head swims.

“You don’t look so good, Adam,” Brett observes as Adam shuffles around to semi-blindly get dressed. Brett, of course, who took no classes earlier than 11:00, is still in his Kylo Ren pajamas and lounging in bed. Adam suddenly and completely hates his guts.

He misses breakfast, arriving just as it closes down. It’s right then and there, staring at the empty buffet lines and fruit baskets, that Adam realizes, with a terrible sense of foreboding, exactly what kind of day he’s about to have.

He’s missed his alarm.

Abruptly, everything seems like it weighs a thousand pounds. He’s pushing his way through jello, the world slow and thick around him. He falls flat on his face as he skids his way out of the dining hall, smacking into the ground and scraping up his hands and knees into stinging red welts.

His Chemistry class is on the other side of campus, but Adam makes it there in record time, leaping over a park bench, sprinting through a group of students on the grass, slingshotting around trees and jumping low walls. When he thunders up the staircase and enters the lab, breathing heavily and internally cursing his mediocre cardio, Dr. Gaudiano doesn’t  even look up. All around the room, students are running experiments with titration tubes and NaOH solutions and bromothymol blue. Adam wants to die.

He walks up to the teacher’s desk, smoothing out the roughness of his breathing. Gaudiano puts his pencil down. Rubs his eyes behind his glasses, delicate chemists hands covered over in folds of crepey skin.

“I’m sorry I’m late, sir,” Adam says. The old man smiles, a kindly quirk of half his mouth.

“It’s alright, Adam. Though, one has to wonder what could keep you away.”

The emphasis on _you_ , which Adam would normally be proud of, feels like salt in the wound. Missing his alarm, what a stupid thing to do. Adam’s ears turn beet red as he mumbles the answer. His head aches something terrible.

“Have a seat, Adam,” Gaudiano says, “I needed to talk to you anyway. Oh, not about this,” he says in reaction to Adam’s expression and waves an airy hand, “about your paper.”

Adam slowly drops his bag from his shoulder and perches on one of the lab stools. Gaudiano fusses with the stack of graded essays, worrying at the corners. He pulls one out, and hands it to Adam, who stares uncomprehendingly at the grade.

C+

“Now,” Gaudiano says, just audible over the rushing in Adam’s ears, “this isn’t because it was bad. Rather, it was extremely thorough. It seems that you’re missing the last two pages, including the conclusion and bibliography. I cannot accept an unsourced paper.”

“I must have left it in the printer,” Adam says through numb lips.

“I assumed,” Gaudiano says with a smile. “If you can get me the missing pages, I’ll regrade it. In the meantime, go do your lab. You can still finish, if you’re efficient.”

The rest of the class passes in a blur of titration and annoyed group partners, the C+ beating a tattoo in Adam’s skull with every pulse of his heartbeat. His eyes feel gritty, all of his muscles weak. C+. Adam’s never received a grade as low as that in his life. At Mountain View High, it had been a breeze. At Aglionby, he’d worked hard to stay a straight A student. C+. Ronan got C+s. Gansey, before Aglionby, got C+s. They were the result of a substandard work ethic, a supreme lack of effort in the eyes of his teachers. A failure. C+.

Adam feels sick, really truly sick, enough that he gags on air and hardly makes it to the trashcan before he retches, boiling bile that burns in his throat and ears. His group partner has stripped off his gloves and has his hand on Adam’s back. It doesn’t last long. Adam doesn’t have much in his stomach.

He stands upright and the room swims a little around him, bright fluorescent lights bobbing like tiny suns over his head. He rinses his mouth out in the sink, turning around to find Gaudiano looking steadily at him.

“I’m fine,” Adam says immediately. Subtly, he presses his hand on the rim of the sink to steady himself.

“Go to the health center, Adam,” the teacher says, “I’ll call you in sick for the rest of the day.”

“No! Please!” The statement is surprisingly loud and Adam shrivels at the fact that he just yelled at a teacher. “I can do it,” he says, more quietly, “I’m fine.”

Gaudiano looks like he has something to say about that, but then the bell rings and he has to shout out the homework before the class flees. Adam slips out the door in the chaos and leans against the wall, head tipped back on the wood paneling. C+.

He calls Gansey, dialing from memory.

Gansey will make him feel better. His number one fan, Adam thinks wryly. Gansey will tell him that it was one mistake, one repairable mistake, that Gaudiano doesn’t seem upset, that he did manage to finish the lab, that Adam deserves to go to Harvard. That he’s not a colossal fuckup. He can make Adam feel better.

Gansey opens the phone conversation into an enormous rushing roar of noise with a yelled but almost indistinguishable “HI ADAM!”

Adam yanks the phone away from his right ear, the background noise drowning out Gansey’s voice. A girl getting something from her locker shoots him a dirty look and he turns his phone volume down.

“Gansey? Where are you?”

“I'M GOOD, THANKS. LISTEN, ADAM, I CAN’T TALK NOW, WE’RE IN A HELICOPTER. CALL YOU LATER, ALRIGHT?”

“Yeah,” Adam lies. “Bye, Gansey.”

“WHAT?”

Adam looks around. The girl is walking away from her locker.

“BYE GANSEY.” He nearly shouts, just as she opens a classroom door into the middle of an absolutely silent test. A dozen students raise their heads like lemmings and stare at him.

“WHAT?”

Adam hangs up the phone. Anxious nausea crawls up his throat. It feels like his eyes want to roll out of his skull. For half a second he debates actually going to the health center, a voice suspiciously like Ronan’s urging him to just miss class, but he banishes that thought with a shake of his head. _We expect better, Mr. Parrish._ C+.

His bag feels made of lead, even though it only has his laptop and a few notebooks in it, and he has to drag himself off of the wall. _I’ll feel better after food_ , he thinks, even though his stomach protests at the mere idea of eating. He starts making his way to the Dining Hall.

Outside of the lab building, the morning chill has been dissipated by the noon sun and Adam peels his Harvard sweater off to tie around his hips. The quad is covered in a dizzying array of students, casually laying out and soaking up the very last of the summer with grassy elbows, milling around water fountains and vending machines, hurriedly rushing across to class, hailing each other in loud voices, picking up a flurry of fallen white papers like bird’s wings, cutting lines through the grass and ignoring the sidewalks, scrambling to catch up to teachers, scrambling to hide from teachers, coaxing squirrels out of trees with nuts, carrying large piles of books or tugging a cart full of Greenpeace posters, wrestling and studying and being young adults. Adam watches.

It’s not until he begins making his own way across that he realizes that, for all the activity, there’s a wide swath of the quad that’s largely abandoned. Adam slowly cuts through it, intent on getting something substantial to eat, and it doesn’t take him long to learn why.

Harvard, as a technically open campus, plays host to a number of these people over the course of a school year. It never takes long for the Campus Security Officers to clear them off, but the free, albeit disinterested, audience of students draws them back like flies to honey. This fly has several picket signs and baskets of pamphlets and an extremely loud preacher’s voice, all declaring that certain lifestyles were, by variants, sin, unnatural, demonic, dangerous to children, abominations, and disrupting to traditional gender roles.

 _Good_ , thinks Adam savagely at the last one, fighting the urge to spit at the protestor. Blue and Ronan would have some things to say to that man. As does the only other student in the entire area, apparently, who’s flinging back harsh diatribes about the man’s intelligence, religion, blood toxicity levels, and breeding.

“You!” Shouts the man as a Adam passes, and Adam instinctively quickens his steps slightly. “Soul-damning, nation destroying filth! How dare you spread your Satanic ideology?”

“What?” Adam says to the other student, who gestures at his torso with a shrug. Adam looks tiredly down at his shirt, something Blue had given Ronan as a gag gift that Adam had accidentally stolen when he packed at the Barns.

It reads, in rainbow letters across the front, “Yes Homo”.

On the other side of the quad, Adam can see four blue-suited CSOs hustling over to them.

“Go to hell,” the other student says cheerfully to the protestor. Adam can’t tell if they’re a boy or a girl. “Satan will be glad to see his kid again.”

“Fuck you,” Adam adds in, sick and tired and cross and utterly not in the mood for this, “aren’t you a little far from Topeka?”

“If I click my heels, can I send you back to Kansas?” Says the student.

“God is your enemy! You’re not blessed but cursed,” yells the protester as he and his signs are bundled unceremoniously from his soapbox by the CSOs.

“I’ve got a God,” Adam says, hardly aware of what's coming out of his mouth, “he’s my boyfriend.”

“Nice _Take Me To Church_ reference,” the student says, hands jammed in their pockets, after a minute of watching the man run from the officers. “I’m Danni.” Adam still can’t tell if they’re a boy or a girl, but then he realizes that it probably doesn’t matter.  

“Adam,” he replies. The student gives a shit eating grin that reminds him of Noah.

“Your boyfriend’s Steve, huh?”

“Ronan,” Adam says and rubs at the back of his neck. “That was exciting.”

“Nothing like the smell of being told I’m unnatural demon spawn in the morning. You missed the part where he kept asking what was in my pants. Guess you can’t be this beautiful and not get some flack.”

Adam laughs. Not meanly, just at the ridiculous experience.

“Thanks for not running away,” Danni says. “I couldn’t just let him keep saying those things unopposed and now I’ve missed Classical History.”

“Shit,” Adam says, realizing that he’s missed his lunch period.

“You too, huh?”

“About late for Biology,” Adam replies, mind already racing to find the best route to class. Twice in one day, how unlucky can he get?

“Hold on, hold on,” Danni says and presses a card with an embossed and colorful _QSA_ on it. “Us birds have to stick together.”

Adam nods, raises a hand in goodbye, and tucks the card in his bag before sprinting away to class. His lungs burn and he can’t seem to pull enough breath in through his nose, but he keeps pushing himself. He finds himself leaning left drastically and it takes quite an effort to straighten out.

Adam arrives at his Biology lab exactly one minute after it starts to find the TA ( _we_ _expect better, Mr. Parrish_ ) finishing up attendance. She is nothing if not ruthlessly efficient. She stares at him through the glass window of the door and Adam, absurdly, feels as if he’s in a high noon shootout. He turns the doorknob and closes the door behind his back, hands on the strap of his bag. He unconsciously tries to cover the slogan of his shirt. Once a day is quite enough homophobia for him, thank you.

“Mr. Parrish,” she says, and he could swear she’s tasting the words as she speaks them, “you’re late.”

This, Adam thinks, is why you don’t give Graduate students power.

“You need to go to the office to clear up your tardy,” she says and several students immediately protest. Ezra actually stands.

“One minute late!” “He’s got straight As, Miss!” “The attendance is still on your computer, just mark him here!” “He’ll miss the lab!” “One minute late!”

“It’s protocol. All late students must clear up their absence,” she says and sends the report in. Adam doesn’t even fight it, just hitches his bag up on his shoulder and exits through the door again. It’s par for the course with how this day is going and honestly, it’s easier not to fight when he feels like this.

Adam sneezes. _No_ , he thinks, trying to make his body work right by pure force of will. _He is not sick._

He sneezes again and this time, there are little white lights that dance in the field of his vision. Adam makes an executive decision and calls the health center, sneezing another three times while he explains that he is not, in fact, going to be able to make it to his Bio lab today.

He slouches back to his room. A little rest and he’ll be fine. He’s not sick. He can still go do things if he wants too. He thinks about Ronan and the time that he was sick and Adam could only microwave canned soup for him and keep Opal away. Ronan had been pissier than usual, but that had been his only symptom until he actually face planted in a field. Adam’s heart aches to think of him.

Adam isn’t face-planting-in-a-field level sick. He logs tiredly into his email, mind still focused utterly on the events of the day: the attempted pamphleteering, oversleeping, missing lunch, the C+. Somewhere inside, he feels cold, like all of his insecurities are rising through his throat. He tastes bile. Perhaps he isn’t good enough for Harvard after all. What on earth made him think he could do this?

The email is from the Student Disciplinary Committee. Adam closes the lid of his laptop and breathes with difficulty through his nose, heart hammering in his chest. He opens it again and, yes, the email is still there. He clicks on it, stomach turning into knots as the page buffers. It loads. He reads. A wry, tired smile crosses his face and he looks around his dorm room.

“I guess they’d notice sooner or later,” Adam mutters and closes the tab telling him that he needs to stop stealing bowls from the cafeteria or begin buying them instead.

He tries to resist, but his bed is too tempting and he’s weak. He dozes rather than sleeps, too offset by the fact that it’s only about 3 in the afternoon to really rest. He dreams, thick fevered sticky things about swirling forests and faceless monsters and the judgement of God, Danni turning into a raven and cawing in his face before being swallowed whole by the TA, whose teeth are like stars and knives, who is sucked away into empty blackness and Opal, running running running towards him, and Ronan devoured by his tattoo.

He wakes up disoriented and pulls the blankets into a cocoon around himself as he sits up, leaning against his window and looking out, his forehead and breath leaving little smudges on the glass. His hands, almost unconsciously, pick up his tarot cards and he shuffles them, thinking about nothing in particular and then about Ronan.

Unthinkingly, he does a pentacle Sidhe spread on his mattress: five cards at the points of a star to work through a problem.

The Magician to start in the South West. The Lovers in the South East. Adam snorts. Of course the cards would start here. They always do for him and Ronan. The Three of Swords in the West. Heartbreak and separation and loneliness, he already knew that. The Eight of Wands almost flips out of the deck to its position in the East, it’s so eager to be put down. Rapid action, opening communication, potential love, things clicking into the big picture. The Four of Wands in the North. Completion and rest, home, order, and, his face colors slightly, marriage.

Adam picks up the Eight of Wands, the solution card. In his deck, depicted by eight downward slanting willow sticks with tiny leaves curling off of them. He taps the card against his lips. Speed and travel. Big decisions made quickly. His brain feels muzzy and slow, like he hasn’t broken free from dreaming yet.

From the wall opposite him, a bang comes through. Adam jumps, scattering the cards off his bed and ruining the layout. He slides to the floor, joints aching, and begins picking them up, recreating his deck from the pile. There’s another bang, and then a squeaky mattress and a long drawn out moan and Adam drops the cards to slap his hands over his ears.

He walks quickly out of the dormroom, hardly stopping to grab his shoes, and flops facedown on the lounge couch. In the distance, he can still hear them at it. Brett wander in and sits on the arm of the chair, a cup of yogurt in his hands. Adam is seriously beginning to question this kid's existence. 

“Hello, Adam,” he says brightly. “Something wrong?”

“Fuck off,” Adam says. His legs start to hurt. “I had the worst day. There was this guy in the quad-”

“I know,” Brett says and taps his ears at Adam’s questioning whimper, “you think these are good for nothing? I heard it through the grapevine.”

“Get off my couch.” Brett hops over to the nearby armchair.

“Tell you what,” he says, seriously enough that Adam looks up. “Come out with us tonight, it’ll be fun and it’ll take your mind off of things.”

Adam just wants to sleep.

“I mean,” Brett continues, “unless you _want_ to hang out with the lovebirds.”

Adam abruptly likes the idea of going to Brett’s party much better.

He likes it far less once he’s there and the smell of alcohol reminds him of every night trapped in the tiny trailer and the close pressed crowd is choking and claustrophobic, and being sober among drunks is irritating rather than fun. He can only hear the bass line in his right ear and he remembers staircases and flashing police lights and Ronan, Ronan, Ronan.

He breaks free to a small table in the corner, hands braced on it as he breathes heavily in the tiny clearing, and when he looks up he’s surprised to see Neya and Ezra drinking together.

“Adam!” Neya says brightly, more than a little buzzed. “Ezra, Adam’s here!”

Ezra nods a hello and then continues drinking steadily out of a bottle of lemonade he looks to have brought himself. Always safe, Ezra. Ever conscious of his mother’s political career.

“Didja know, Ezra, Adam’s gotta sugar daddy,” Neya says with a giggle. She’s drunk, hanging around Ezra’s neck, a tiny pink puffball on a mountain. “His sugar daddy’s gotta kid and lives in the mountains and runs a farm with… with goats and stuff.”

Ezra catches her when she falls, standing her up and bursting out into tiny giggles when she weaves on her feet. His brow furrows after a second.

“That’s not- that’s not right.”

Adam revises his opinion of Ezra. The lemonade is clearly spiked.

Brett comes swinging by out of the faceless crowd. His hair is mussed into a tower on his head and he has violently purple lipstick stains all over his face and neck. He shoves a red Solo cup into Adam’s hands and yells to be heard above the music.

“Loosen up, Adam, the night’s young and it’s not like you have anything but lecture tomorrow!”

“Adam’s,” Neya repeats, sloshing a little from her cup onto the table. Adam grabs it from her and keeps it away. For such a slim girl, she’s clearly had a lot of alcohol. “Adam’s gotta sugar daddy.”

“I don’t actually,” Adam informs Ezra, though the other boy will clearly remember none of this tomorrow. “It’s just my boyfriend, he lives in Virginia, about an eight hour drive,” he pauses, “away.” The Eight of Wands. Rapid movement for conflict resolution. Nothing but lecture tomorrow.

“Ezra,” he says suddenly. “Can I borrow your car tonight?”

The other boy blinks slowly and nods. Adam feels mildly guilty for taking advantage of his inebriated state but this is important and he’d say yes without the alcohol. He fishes the keys out of his pocket and tosses them to Adam, who nods and sinks into the crowd to make it to the door.

He turns around and comes back.

“Don’t sleep together,” he says, and then he leaves for real.

Ezra’s car is a sweet little blue Mustang with over 400 horsepower and a modified quieter engine. It still deafens the parking lot when Adam starts it up, a low rumbling purr that races through the seats and steering wheel into Adam’s body. It feels alive and excited, coiled energy under his hands. Eight of Wands. Adam eases it out of the parking stall and onto the main road, desperate to get onto the highway.

It’s eight ’o clock at night and the drive takes eight hours. Adam cranks the windows down, takes the emptier route, and makes it in 5. September air snaps against his cheeks as he races through the night, carefully dodging other cars on the highway and slowing any time he thinks there are police. Even with that, he’s pushing an average hundred miles an hour.

The Mustang sings on the road, racing like an arrow across the tarmac and Adam suddenly, exactly, understands what joy Ronan gets from drag racing.

It’s addicting on his lips.

He laughs, a long unspooling sound like a thread of tension being snipped away. It sails out the window of the car and splashes at the corners of his mouth and Adam can feel stress falling from his shoulders. Ronan is magic that way. Even the ghost of an idea of him can make Adam feel better.

It all plays out in his mind, what he’s going to say, what he’s going to do to Ronan, how he’s going to apologize in a thousand kisses all night if that’s what it takes. Beg forgiveness in a thousand touches. It pounds like a mantra in his head, home, home, home. Adam doesn’t feel sick at all. He is wild this night.

Before he knows it, he’s making the turn into the Barns. The engine quiets as he makes the black green swing onto the winding drive to the main house. Empty paddocks and pastures pass by on either side of him and he’s suddenly gripped with the terrible fear that maybe something happened to Ronan after their fight, after Blue’s call, after all of it, that made Ronan unable to answer. Maybe he’s gone forever.

Then Adam passes a copse and the warm lights of the main house come into view and his heart beats again. The blue Mustang pulls up askew to the BMW, Adam leaving the car door hanging as he scrambles to the porch. The kitchen lights are on, on at 2 am, but Adam can’t bring himself to be annoyed at the lack of concern for electricity usage or the lack of bedtime. Soft voices come from that room as he steps up the stairs, easily hopping over the creaking middle one.

The porch swing, a monstrously rusted old bench that had been a favorite of Niall and Aurora’s, swings heavily in the breeze. He knocks, though Ronan would clearly have heard the Mustang pull up. There’s a pause. He jams his hands into his pockets, wishing he still had his Harvard sweater in the night air.

Then Ronan appears on the other side of the door.

“I’m sorry,” Adam blurts out immediately, before Ronan has even opened the screen door. His hand pauses on the latch as he looks cooly at Adam. His hair has grown out from the buzzcut, sloppy curls just tipping up around his face. In the daylight, they make Ronan look softer, almost like a normal human. Now, in the rusty glow of the porchlight, they’re knifelike question marks, throwing sharp accusations from Ronan’s cheeks.     

Adam expects a snarky smirk, or a hostile silence, or a scoff. He hopes for forgiveness and a kiss. What he gets is a long pause. And then Ronan says, “I wasn’t hungry on Saturday.”

Adam’s eyebrows form a question.

“I wasn’t hungry,” Ronan says, “but Opal was. So after I hung up, I made dinner. I set the table and talked with her and ate. The food tasted like shit. I called Blue after she went to sleep.”

“Ronan—”

“Let me finish.” Ronan’s face is carefully shuttered, like he’s trying to be a machine instead of a human. Adam’s heart aches from it. “If you’re signed on for this,” Ronan says, “you’re signed on for all of it. You can’t ignore us next time you want to gallivant in the dreamscape. You’re not alone anymore.”

Adam knows. Adam has known since Ronan’s birthday, since the church, since before.

“If you hurt her with your idiotic decision making,” Ronan says, though it’s clearly ripping him in two, “you’ll never see us again.”

He vanishes from behind the screen door, headed back to the kitchen. Adam can just make out Opal perched on the counter, kicking her legs and sipping at a tupperware of milk. The porch swing stands silent witness to Adam on the porch. The road leading from the Barns rustles behind him, the Mustang’s open door a gaping invitation.

Adam goes inside the house.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry y’all, I got sick over the weekend and it was hard to write well. Thank you for the tumblr messages, they really made my day.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi @ melodysoars.tumblr.com


End file.
